A New Vision for Millennials and the Church, Part 3

Today I continue my series on a new vision for millennials and the church.

Part 1 was about the big picture failures of the church:

http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-new-vision-for-millennials-and-church.html

Part 2 was a more general overview of the aspects of the new vision:

http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-new-vision-for-millennials-and-church_9.html

Today I am going to take a more in-depth look at parts of what I covered in Part 2.

I want to start with Biblical training/teaching. Here is what I wrote in my last post:

[Biblical training/teaching] can be achieved through a variety of means and will be unique to the individual setup of the church. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, this cannot be accomplished solely through the sermon. There must be intentional Bible study within the church. The two best ways are Sunday school or small groups. I am partial to Sunday school, but realize small groups is often the best for schedules of individuals.
 The key is “Biblical”. These meetings should focus on scripture teaching and discussion rather than books or hang out sessions. There is certainly a place for those two things, but Biblical study can expose people to the fullness of scripture and prevent some of the cherry picking of verses or focus on things other than the Word. I personally have found great success in going through entire Gospels or Epistles or OT writings, forcing me to address tougher scripture that is not well known or talked about. Always for a fully understanding of God.

I want to start with a more general thought of small groups and Bible study. As I mentioned in my last posting that while I think a strong sermon is critical for a church, it is not because it will have the ability to dig deep into scripture. The strength comes from taking scripture and providing the foundation for belief, as well as vision and direction for the body. The sermon should be the start of the conversation, not the culmination. The sermon should move something in the hearer, and lead to a desire to know (and experience) more.

This leads to the small group or Sunday school class. The big gathering of the church is critical, and I am a supporter and will be always, but one of the main benefits of the big meeting is that it allows for the community that can meet in small groups. It is the beginning of community that can be developed through other means. It is valuable to take a closer look at the differences between the big gathering and the small groups that can flow from it.

The first difference is intimacy. The big gathering allows for people to come in and out and avoid any meaningful contact, without any follow up and without any accountability. It allows people to be passive participants in their faith, passive participants in their worship, and passive participants in their engagement with scripture. The small group demands a level of intimacy. There is a chance to develop meaningful relationship, to follow up on each other’s lives on a consistent and regular basis, and to have some sort of accountability in your life and with your faith.

The second difference is engagement. As mentioned above, the large gathering is a passive way to experience faith. There may be communal response, but in general if you are not involved in the service you are a consumer of what is being presented. Being in a gathering is nice and can lead to a response, but there is no way to individualize the worship experience, no to respond to the sermon with questions, etc. The small group calls for questions, answers, a more intimate sharing of struggles and suffering. It is an opportunity to go deep with a handful of people as opposed to surface with many.

The third and final difference is depth. As mentioned in the previous sentence, there is depth in the relationships with individual, but there is also potential depth in prayer and in study. There is certainly power in communal prayer, communal worship and communal teaching, but there is a need for the fulfillment of individual needs.

When I think of millennials, I think of how these three things intersect. The large group gathering is how individuals will “shop” for a church, but the small group is how they will commit to a church. There is a thought that millennials are so much different than previous generations but I am skeptical of this claim. Things may manifest differently because of different technology and life circumstances such as school, jobs, economic concerns, etc. may shift the timeframe of major life milestones relative to previous generations, but there are still commonalities of all generations. These include a desire for intimate connections, relationship, community, stability, and to serve something greater than themselves. This does not make millennials unique.

All this brings me to the last point I want to make about small groups and/or Sunday school – the content. This is one of the pillars of my new vision and it isn’t all the cutting edge or advanced, in fact it is pretty much a return to the ways of previous Sunday school. I would make the argument that the key to millennials is a true, unapologetic study of scripture. This goes back to the point that I was trying make in the first post I made, that the church is failing in the basic mission that it is called to do, namely caring for the widows, orphans and foreigners.

Too much of the curriculum has been based on trying to understand the themes or lessons of scripture while downplaying what scripture actually says. A study of scripture will provide the basis for what is needed for the people of the church to fulfill the mission of the church. The lesson I would want out of this posting is to read less books, less articles, less studies and more scripture. This will cause everyone to encounter scripture in ways that they are not used to, to explore passages that are not often taught, and to have a wholistic understanding of the Bible. To shortchange the Bible is to shortchange what the church is all about. To shortchange the Bible and focus on something else results in a church that is nothing much more than a book club. We can do better as a church. We must do better as a church.

My next post will build a little bit more upon this idea as I think about the role of the Seminary.